Both students and experts of international law are familiar with the claim that “international law isn’t real.” Although critics advance this claim through a variety of arguments, one of the most influential is that international law lacks effective enforcement mechanisms. 

According to this view, the reality of law depends on whether its enforcement mechanisms achieve the objectives the system sets for itself. In other words, an enforcement mechanism is considered effective if it advances the goals it is designed to achieve. Applied to international law, this argument is often framed in terms of global compliance. Without enforcement capable of forcing adherence to its rules, international law is reduced to moral aspiration or political preference rather than law in any tangible sense. 

Treating the effectiveness of enforcement mechanisms as the condition that distinguishes “real” law from mere theory, however, presents a fundamental difficulty. International law admittedly lacks a completely centralized enforcement authority. However, the argument is not simply that international law is ineffective because it enforces its rules differently than domestic systems. The argument is that international law does not exist because its enforcement mechanisms fail to achieve the compliance goal they are designed to enforce. 

If applied consistently, this logic cannot be confined to the international context. It also calls into question the reality of domestic legal systems whose enforcement mechanisms routinely fail to meet their own stated objectives. To illustrate this point, this article examines the enforcement mechanisms of the United States criminal legal system and evaluates their effectiveness against the goals the system sets for itself. 

Enforcement as a Benchmark: The U.S. Criminal Legal System 

Criminal law in the United States is enforced through a network of federal, state, and local police agencies that operate within constitutionally defined jurisdictions. 

Despite jurisdictional variation, several foundational objectives of policing are widely recognized. According to the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards for Police Function, these objectives include: (1) identifying and apprehending criminal offenders for subsequent court proceedings; (2) protecting individuals in danger of physical harm; (3) maintaining public order; and (4) creating a sense of security in the community. 

If the effectiveness of its enforcement mechanisms is the benchmark for determining whether a type of law is real, the above objectives provide a framework for assessing the reality of U.S. criminal law. In other words, criminal law in the U.S. can be considered “real” to the extent that policing successfully advances these goals. 

However, upon measuring these objectives against empirical data on policing performance, substantial gaps emerge between what enforcement is meant to accomplish and what it achieves. Clearance rates remain low, harm-prevention efforts often fail or produce counterproductive outcomes, public order is pursued through methods that generate significant social harm, and public confidence in remaining safe continues to fall. If enforcement effectiveness is treated as the defining condition of legal reality, these failures carry serious implications for the U.S. criminal system. Under that standard, the persistence of systematic underperformance would place the existence of U.S. criminal law itself in doubt, since its primary enforcement mechanism routinely falls short of the objectives it is designed to serve. 

(1) Are Police Effectively Identifying and Apprehending Offenders? 

A fundamental objective of law enforcement is the identification and apprehension of criminal offenders. Evaluating the effectiveness of policing in this regard requires examining clearance rates, which measure how many reported crimes are “solved.” The FBI publishes national crime data on cleared cases; however, a “clearance” can be recorded even if the arrest does not result in a successful conviction, which makes exact figures difficult to determine. 

From January 2021 to January 2026, clearance rates for major crimes remained at approximately 50 percent or less, with markedly lower rates for certain offenses. For example, the clearance rate for vehicle theft was a minuscule 0.09 percent. 

These figures suggest that the U.S. criminal legal system falls significantly short of what might reasonably be considered effective enforcement for this objective. While no universal threshold for effectiveness exists, a system that fails to resolve most reported crimes cannot plausibly be described as successfully achieving its goal of identifying and apprehending offenders.

(2) Are Police Protecting Individuals in Danger of Physical Harm? 

Beyond identifying and apprehending offenders, a central objective of law enforcement is protecting individuals who are in danger of physical harm. Evaluating effectiveness in this domain requires examining police responses to populations that are particularly vulnerable to physical harm, including: individuals experiencing behavioral health crises, victims of domestic violence, and those subject to welfare checks. 

Behavioral health emergencies demonstrate a significant challenge in achieving this objective. Between 5 and 15 percent of all emergency calls involve a behavioral health crisis, and police are typically dispatched as the default response due to the lack of specialized emergency services. In these situations, officers are called out to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others. However, the outcome of these police responses is often tragically counterproductive. In 2016, 25 percent of all fatal police shootings involved people experiencing behavioral health crises. Rather than neutralizing the harm, police intervention may escalate it, resulting in death for the very individual police were dispatched to protect. This suggests that, despite the goal of protection, the enforcement mechanism routinely fails to safeguard this vulnerable population. 

Domestic violence crimes reflect a related but distinct enforcement failure: harm persists not because police escalate violence once involved, but because law enforcement often never intervenes at all. Aggravated domestic violence incidents in urban areas are estimated to be 29 to 53 percent higher than what is captured in police reports, leading to the assumption that there are a significant number of physically violent incidents that law enforcement, for whatever reason, is not protecting domestic violence victims from. 

Welfare checks—initiated to ensure an individual’s safety following a police report from a concerned third party—further illustrate the limits of protective enforcement. Welfare checks are meant to be a service from police agencies to communities to protect those who reportedly may be in danger of being a harm to themselves, or otherwise unable to adequately care for themselves. Yet between 2019 and 2021, at least 178 individuals were fatally shot by law enforcement while performing the welfare check designed to protect them. 

Across these populations, a consistent pattern emerges. Police interventions often fail to prevent physical harm and, in many cases, exacerbate it. When a core enforcement objective is regularly unfulfilled or counterproductive, it calls into question the law’s practical capability to protect those it is meant to safeguard. 

(3) Is Mass Incarceration Maintaining Public Order or Is It State Overreach? 

In addition to preventing harm to individuals, law enforcement is tasked with maintaining public order, often understood to include incarceration as a means of deterrence and behavioral regulation. In practice, however, the U.S. approach relies on incarceration at a rate unmatched by most other countries. Over 5 million people are currently under criminal legal supervision in the U.S., including approximately 2 million who are incarcerated in prisons or jails. 

Scholars have long observed that incarceration at this expansive scope produces significant social harm, particularly when applied to low-level offenses. The growth of the incarcerated population has been dramatic: in the early 1970s, fewer than 400,000 people were imprisoned, increasing at an annual rate of 8 percent during the late twentieth century. 

While these policies are formally justified as promoting public order, expansive reliance on incarceration raises difficult questions. High incarceration rates may suppress visible disorder, but they also impose profound physical, psychological, and economic harms on individuals, families, and communities—harms that undermine long-term social stability. 

Viewed in this light, incarceration appears limited as an enforcement mechanism. It produces a form of control, but not the safe, stable, and equitable public order the law ostensibly seeks to maintain. 

(4) Does Law Enforcement Create a Sense of Security in the Community? 

Finally, public perceptions of safety further undermine claims of enforcement success. National surveys indicate that more than half of Americans report feeling as though they are in imminent danger at least once each day. A system that cultivates persistent fear struggles to satisfy one of law enforcement’s most basic objectives. 

Rethinking Enforcement and the Reality of Law 

These observations do not suggest that the United States has the least effective criminal law enforcement mechanism globally, as other nations may perform worse by similar measures. Nor is the argument that international law outperforms domestic systems. Rather, the argument is that if law ceases to exist whenever enforcement mechanisms fail to achieve their stated goals, then the same reasoning used to deny the reality of international law would also call into question the reality of domestic law. Under such a standard, law itself becomes an unstable concept. 

To be sure, this analysis simplifies the complexity of the enforcement of U.S. criminal law. Furthermore, some critics argue not merely that international law is ineffectively enforced, but that it lacks enforcement mechanisms altogether due to the absence of a centralized enforcement authority. Dismissing international law as unenforced, however, ignores the diverse tools it employs such as reputational costs, economic sanctions, and diplomatic pressure that likewise operate as enforcement mechanisms, even if they differ from domestic policing. Though less visibly coercive, these mechanisms impose real constraints and consequences within transnational legal relations. 

The comparison offered here illustrates a narrower point: when the same enforcement-based reasoning is applied to domestic legal systems, it produces similarly destabilizing conclusions. A complete refutation of the enforcement critique would require a broader examination across multiple legal systems and jurisdictions. Nevertheless, this comparison demonstrates that imperfect enforcement is not unique to international law—it is a persistent feature of legal systems more generally. 🔹